On Wednesday, national group called UltraViolet — which works "to fight sexism and expand women's rights" — sent a press release to news outlets through publicist Fitzgibbon Media saying: "UltraViolet members funded a billboard set to run at the airport in Reno."

When asked for details, Fitzgibbon representative named Brett Abrams responded: "UltraViolet heard back from the airport, which has decided to reject running the ad."

Brian Kulpin, vice president of marketing and public affairs for Reno-Tahoe International Airport, said, "We never rejected it because they never contacted us."

(Abrams later emailed to say that actually a third party, not UltraViolet, contacted the airport and learned it doesn't accept political advocacy ads.)

Despite the shady origins of this week's claims, Fact Checker decided to examine them because they are likely to come up again thanks to Democrats deciding to make an issue of the "war on women" in midterm elections.

UltraViolet gives two sources to back up the proposed billboard.

The fourth claim listed above leads back to a 2013 report by Child Care Aware America, an organization of child-care resource and referral agencies.

The group's survey ranks Nevada as having the 11th highest (least affordable) care for an infant in a licensed child-care center. The average annual cost in Nevada is pegged at $9,608, which is 13.4 percent of the state median income for a married couple ($71,934).

Another statistic in the report looks at average tuition and fees at a public college in each state and then calculates the percentage difference between that cost and infant care.

In Nevada, the report says, it costs $3,237 more for annual infant care than a year of college. Only four states were worse than Nevada: New York, Alaska, Maryland and Massachusetts.

The Children's Cabinet in Reno put out a similar report in 2012. It pegged the average annual cost of licensed infant care in Nevada at $9,751 and a year's tuition and fees at the Reno and Las Vegas universities at $6,983 — a difference of $2,768, about $200 less than the proposed billboard's text.

The Family and Medical Leave Act, signed by Bill Clinton, merely guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to mothers for a newborn or newly adopted child.

(The National Partnership for Women & Families reported in June that 181 countries other than the U.S. guarantee paid maternal leave and 81 guarantee paid leave for new fathers. But a Pew Research Center report found that the better the maternity leave in a country, the bigger its gender pay gap. The U.S., it said, had one of the lowest gender pay gaps among industrial countries.)

Some states have added maternal leave benefits beyond the federal law; Nevada is not one of them.

The second claim is that 17 percent of Nevada women live in poverty. UltraViolet links to a Center for American Progress report that uses 2012 Census data. It shows a 17.5 percent poverty rate for "women and girls" in Nevada.

The national poverty rate for females is 17.2 percent.

A Kaiser Family Foundation report using 2012 and 2013 Census data says adult women ages 19 to 64 in Nevada have a poverty rate of 21 percent compared with a 20 percent national rate.

The Center for American Progress report actually says Nevada women earn 85 cents for every $1 earned by a "white man." (Shockingly, it finds Hispanic women in Nevada earn 53 cents for every $1 by a white man.)

Forbes crunched 2013 Census data state by state. Its report concurred that there's a 15-cent pay gap for Nevada women — and it found this was best in the nation. (In Utah, the pay gap was put at 30 cents, with the national gap at 23 cents.)

Fact Checker — and many other fact checkers around the nation — have found this gender pay gap to be misleading because it merely totals the pay of men and women and divides the women's number into the men's, without taking into account hours worked, seniority, the same job compared with the same job and other key factors. For instance, men working full-time worked 36 minutes longer on average every day in 2013 than women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — more work generally means more pay, regardless of which gender is doing it.

Multiple studies have found the majority of the gender pay gap is related to non-gender variables. That said, a significant fraction is indeed linked to gender.

As mentioned in a previous Fact Checker, a 2007 American Association of University Women report used regression analysis to understand how multiple variables affect pay. Researchers found that "once job and workplace, demographic and experience, and education and training variables were added, an unexplained pay gap of 12 percent remained" that seemed related to gender discrimination.

The verdict

• 1. Pay gap claim: Misleading because raw pay gap data does not take into account mitigating variables such as hours worked. The claim is further problematic because Nevada has the nation's lowest gender pay gap whereas the claim implies the state ranks poorly.

• 2. Poverty claim: True but a tad misleading because highlighting Nevada's poverty rate for women makes it seem worse than in other states when it's similar to the national rate.

• 3. Maternity leave claim: Technically true but somewhat misleading because it makes it seem like Nevada is an exception in not offering guaranteed paid leave when no states do.

• 4. Day care claim: True, Nevada infant care costs much more than a university education per year — and it's worth noting because the state ranks poorly compared with others.

Workplace gender discrimination merits debate, but bumpersticker claims like those examined here need more context to understand what's going on — and making them as part of an untrustworthy marketing campaign undermines their credibility.